Q&A WITH BRADY CORBET

Q.  All of your films are about historical junctures, particularly tragic ones. What is it about the relationship between these historical junctures and the present moment that you are seeking to uncover?

A. I’m a huge fan of the authors W. G. Sebald and V. S. Naipaul, who frequently wrote virtual histories. What’s interesting about Sebald’s books is that they have a light footedness about them. They are full of grace and wisdom, but every story either begins or ends in genocide. His body of work is entirely focused on destruction and regeneration throughout the various cycles of the 20th century. I think that the medium of cinema is a great way of accessing a feeling for history, which is something that many biographies and biopics really miss by treating history as something linear — as cause-and-effect, or a series of dates and figures. I don’t relate to that conception of history.

It’s one thing to say that history repeats itself, it’s another to feel that history repeats itself — it has dizzying and uncanny effects on the present. Even though many of them were made in Europe, all of my films are about America. The Childhood of a Leader is a film about American culpability in the months leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, and how Woodrow Wilson inadvertently paved the way for a fascist uprising. Twelve years later, Vox Lux is more self-evident because it’s about post-Columbine, post-9/11 America. Then, The Brutalist is a film about how postwar architecture and postwar psychology are intrinsically linked. I became a history junkie when I was a teenager. I caught the bug and it never went away.

Q. You’ve spoken about The Brutalist in very novelistic terms — its relationship to Sebald and Naipul, as well as its runtime being like that of a multi-volume novel. What influence has the novel had on your work as a filmmaker?

A. I grew up working in a bookstore. When I was seven years old, I was struggling to read and some teachers thought that I was dyslexic, but I think I probably either had mild ADHD or hadn’t had a great teacher. But, there was a woman named Serena and her husband Mike, who had a bookstore called Glenwood Books in my hometown. It was a bookstore that focused on books that were out of print, first editions, and a lot of alternative literature. So, there was a focus on LGBTQ literature. I remember that I read Mysterious Skin when I worked there and years later, I worked with Gregg Araki on his adaptation of it.

Serena and Mike were really helping me along with my reading, and had a real affection for me, and I did for them. They couldn’t pay me because I was just a kid, but by the time I was 12 years old, I had amassed an amazing collection of first editions, which was essentially how they compensated me for my time at the register — just small-town stuff you couldn’t get away with anymore. I have no interest in writing a novel because writing a screenplay and writing a novel are not equivalent; a screenplay is like a blueprint or a manual.

Reading, for me, has always been my real hobby — something that is only for pleasure. I have a feeling that great novels from the 20th century, from Robert Musil and Ingeborg Bachmann, and poets as well, like Bachmann and Paul Celan, really had a major impact on the way that I think about storytelling and writing screenplays. The same way that Musil’s books are frequently described as novels of ideas, I think of my movies as movies of ideas.

Q. Your decision to shoot this film on VistaVision has become an unavoidable talking-point in relation to The Brutalist’s release — it’s seen as both a mark of ambition and an unorthodox choice. When Vox Lux came out, you said that “images used to be more special because there were fewer of them, and they were harder to make.” Could you speak to your drive to film The Brutalist on VistaVision and how that decision informed the look of the film?

A. The democratization of the image has its pros and cons. I think that the pros are obvious. It’s obvious that image-making and motion-picture capture is more accessible — and that’s great. But, if anyone were to take a photography class, the first thing that your professor would say is that if it’s too easy to take the picture, it’s usually not a very interesting picture.

You have to get up on a fire escape, you’ve got to break out a long lens, you have to hang upside down — then, something interesting starts to happen. It has become so easy to create images that look slick and serviceable, and it’s made for less interesting pictures. Every time I’m looking for a film to watch with my family on all of the various streamers and stuff, everything looks the same because these films are usually being shot on the same two or three digital cameras.

Those cameras don’t have an extraordinary amount of latitude. They can do one thing sort of well, and that’s about it. There are some films that were shot digitally and all the better for it, like those from the Dogme 95 Movement, or Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest from last year. The way he shot that movie could not have been done on celluloid. But in general, I would say that it’s the difference between watercolors and painting with oil. We’ve come so close to losing film as a format, and I don’t think everyone realizes how difficult it is for Kodak to keep the lights on in Rochester every year — it’s expensive.

It’s expensive to make celluloid; therefore, it’s expensive to shoot it. On this film, it accounted for perhaps one-and-a-half, or two percent, of our film’s total gross budget. So, I find it to be a very strange line-item to attack, particularly with this film being a period piece. Film feels like our best tool for accessing the period. But I’m not totally dogmatic. I shot the end of the movie on DigiBeta, which we then blew up to 35mm. I like to work with digital cameras as well, but of course, always want to have celluloid as an option.

Q. The Childhood of a Leader dealt with the origins of fascism and in The Brutalist you address the psychological fallout of fascism after World War II. More recently, you’ve spoken about President Donald Trump’s quest to raze all of the brutalist buildings in Washington D.C. — the style of architecture your film frames as its protagonist’s embodied response to WWII. What continues to motivate your investigation of fascism on film?

A. Because if we look south, to Brazil, we have Bolsonaro. Or, east of here, Marine Le Pen in France. This is not a national crisis, it’s a global one. Twenty years ago, I never expected to be raising my daughter under an autocracy. It’s a theme and a subject that will unfortunately always be relevant.

I also recently had a discussion with Denis Villeneuve in Los Angeles in which I said, “Making a movie is a marriage, it’s not a one-night stand.” And he said, “It’s not a marriage, it’s a tattoo on your fucking face.” That really made me laugh because I knew exactly what he meant. You carry the baggage of a project with you forever.

It’s amazing to me that people will still bring up things to me that I did 25 years ago. 25 years ago, I was 11 years old. It just never goes away. When you’re choosing a project, I think that the subject matter has to be something that you know will still be significant for you and audiences by the time it gets made.

You have to assume that a film can easily take a decade to get made. This film took seven years to make, but it easily could have turned into 10 to 14. I think that if I made it in four or five years from now, it would still be of historical and philosophical value… And hopefully, of some artistic value as well. It’s probably the most important subject of our times, second only to quantum physics; at some point in my life, I’ll get there.

Q. What’s the first piece of art you remember making?

A. I remember making a film when I was 11 years old that was sort of ambitious. I mean, ambitious in the sense that it took me time to cast it and shoot it.

Q. What’s a piece of advice you’ve never forgotten?

A. One of my dearest friends, who is a bit older than I am and very wise, used to tell me: “Life is long; it’s not short, it’s long, be patient, be radical, be free.” “Life is long” and for whatever reason, it’s a simple sentiment, but it’s stuck with me.

Q. What have you been listening to?

A. I’ve mostly been listening to a lot of music from the late ‘70s because I’m currently working on a project that is predominantly set in Northern California in the ‘70s. A lot of Terry Riley, Aphrodite’s Child, and early ambient music from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Q. If you could add movies to a video store shelf, which three titles would they be?

A. I’ll go with a theme: medieval. On the shelf, I would place Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Marketa Lazarová, and Andrei Rublev.

Q. Who, or what, do you think is the future of filmmaking?

A. I genuinely believe that large-format cinematography is the future of the medium for a variety of reasons. One is that part of the reason that I was so intent on shooting this movie on large-format and releasing it on large-format was to signal to the filmmaking community that it’s not something that only belongs to big-budget pictures.

We had to move sand around in the box accordingly, because large-format is more expensive than a standard 3-Perf 35mm. But, even on a budget of 9.6 million dollars, with enough material to make a three-and-a-half-hour movie out of it, we were able to figure it out, which should equate to films that are being made for between four and six million dollars that are under two hours. There should be a path forward for those projects as well.

The only way that we can make large format more accessible is if more of us are doing it. The more of us that are doing it, the less expensive and more competitive it becomes. More labs would start opening their doors as well, because as of right now, there’s only one company in the world that makes large-format prints: FotoKem in Los Angeles. I just think that in a day-and-age when we are encouraging audiences to get off their couch, we really have to give them a reason to do so — now more than ever.

Universal is releasing this film internationally, and they made quite a few more 70mm prints after the initial two that we had made. They told us that it’s great for the movie, but that it’s also great business. It is the one tool we currently have to really event-ize the movie-going experience, even though it’s a tool that has been available to us since the 1950s. The past is the future.

Q. What image would you like to end this interview on?

I would like to end with an image from Saul Leiter, because we’ve been asked frequently what the major influences were on the film’s aesthetic. For two years, our office was filled with Saul Leiter’s iconic street photography and early color photographs. So, I’d like to end on the iconic image of a woman running with a red umbrella in the snow.